My favorite political moment of the 1960s was a Black
Panther rally in a quadrangle of Smith College on a luxuriant spring day.
Ramboesgue in berets and ammunition belts, several young black males exhorted
hundreds of young white females to contribute money to Bobby Seale's defense
fund. I stood at the back of the crowd watching yarn ties on blonde ponytails
bobbing up and down while the daughters of CEOs nodded in agreement with the
Panthers' attack on the ruling class.

It was all so girlish—or boyish, depending on your point
of view. Whatever revolution was fomenting posed no apparent threat to gender
roles. Still, women who were not particularly sensitive to chauvinism in the
counterculture or the typical fraternity planned to attend graduate or professional
school and pursue careers that would have been practically unthinkable for them
ten years earlier. Feminism was altering their lives as much as draft avoidance
was altering the lives of their male counterparts.

Today, three decades of feminism and one Year of the Woman
later, a majority of American women agree that feminism has altered their lives
for the better. In general, polls conducted over the past three years indicate
strong majority support for feminist ideals. But the same polls suggest that a majority
of women hesitate to associate themselves with the movement. As Karlyn Keene, a
resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed, more than
three quarters of American women support efforts to "strengthen and change
women's status in society," yet only a minority, a third at most, identify
themselves as feminists.

Many feminists take comfort in these polls, inferring
substantial public support for economic and political equality, and dismissing
women's wariness of the feminist label as a mere image problem (attributed to
unfair media portrayals of feminists as a strident minority of frustrated
women). But the polls may also adumbrate unarticulated ambivalence about
feminist ideals, particularly with respect to private life. If widespread
support for some measure of equality reflects the way women see, or wish to
see, society, their unwillingness to identify with feminism reflects the way
they see themselves, or wish to be seen by others.

To the extent that it challenges discrimination and the
political exclusion of women, feminism is relatively easy for many women to
embrace. It appeals to fundamental notions of fairness; it suggests that social
structures must change but that individuals, particularly women, may remain the
same. For many women, feminism is simply a matter of mommy-tracking, making
sure that institutions accommodate women's familial roles, which are presumed
to be essentially immutable. But to the extent that feminism questions those
roles and the underlying assumptions about sexuality, it requires profound
individual change as well, posing an unsettling challenge that well-adjusted
people instinctively avoid. Why question norms of sex and character to which
you've more or less successfully adapted?

Of course, the social and individual changes demanded by
feminism are not exactly divisible. Of course, the expansion of women's
professional roles and political power affects women's personality development.
Still, many people manage to separate who they are in the workplace from who
they are in bed, which is why feminism generates so much cognitive dissonance.
As it addresses and internalizes this dissonance and women's anxiety about the
label "feminism," as it embarks on a "third wave," the
feminist movement today may suffer less from a mere image problem than from a
major identity crisis.

It's difficult, of course, to generalize about how
millions of American women imagine feminism and what role it plays in their
lives. All one can say with certitude is that different women define and relate
to feminism differently. The rest—much of this essay—is speculation, informed
by conversations with editors of women's magazines (among the most reliable
speculators about what women want), polling data, and ten years of experience
studying feminist issues.

Resistance to the Label

Robin Morgan, the editor in chief of Ms., and Ellen
Levine, the editor in chief of Redbook, two veterans of women's magazines and
feminism, offer different views of feminism's appeal, each of which seems true,
in the context of their different constituencies. Morgan sees a resurgent
feminist movement and points to the formation of new feminist groups on campus
and intensified grass-roots activity by women addressing a range of issues,
from domestic violence to economic revitalization. Ellen Levine, however,
believes that for the middle-class family women who read Redbook (the average
reader is a thirty-nine-year-old wage-earning mother), feminism is "a
non-issue." She says, "They don't think about it; they don't talk
about it." They may not even be familiar with the feminist term of art
"glass ceiling," which feminists believe has passed into the
vernacular. And they seem not to be particularly interested in politics. The
surest way not to sell Redbook is to put a woman politician on the cover: the
January, 1993, issue of Good Housekeeping, with Hillary Clinton on the cover,
did poorly at the newsstands, according to Levine.

Editors at more upscale magazines—Mirabella, Harper's
Bazaar, and Glamour—are more upbeat about their readers' interest in feminism,
or at least their identification with feminist perspectives. Gay Bryant,
Mirabella's editor in chief, says, "We assume our readers are feminists
with a small 'f.' We think of them as strong, independent, smart women; we
think of them as pro-woman, although not all of them would define themselves as
feminists politically." Betsy Carter, the executive editor of Harper's
Bazaar, suggests that feminism has been assimilated into the culture of the
magazine: "Feminism is a word that has been so absorbed in our
consciousness that I don't isolate it. Asking me if I believe in feminism is
like asking me if I believe in integration." Carter says, however, that
women tend to be interested in the same stories that interest men: "Except
for subjects like fly-fishing, it's hard to label something a man's story or a
woman's story." In fact, she adds, "it seems almost obsolete to talk
about women's magazines." Carter, a former editor at Esquire, recalls that
Esquire's readership was 40 percent female, which indicated to her that
"women weren't getting what they needed from the women's magazines."

Ruth Whitney, the editor in chief of Glamour might
disagree. She points out that Glamour runs monthly editorials with a decidedly
"feminist" voice that infuses the magazine. Glamour readers may or
may not call themselves feminists, she says, but "I would call Glamour a
mainstream feminist magazine, in its editorials, features, fashions, and
consumerism." Glamour is also a pro-choice magazine; as Whitney stresses,
it has long published pro-choice articles—more than any other mainstream
women's magazine, according to her. And it is a magazine for which women seem
to constitute the norm: "We use the pronoun 'she' when referring to a doctor,
lawyer, whomever, and that does not go unnoticed by our readers."

Some women will dispute one underlying implication of
Betsy Carter's remarks—that feminism involves assimilation, the merger of male
and female spheres of interest. Some will dispute any claims to feminism by any
magazine that features fashion. But whether Ms. readers would call Harper's
Bazaar, Mirabella, and Glamour feminist magazines, or magazines with feminist
perspectives, their readers apparently do, if Betsy Carter, Gay Bryant, and
Ruth Whitney know their audiences.

Perhaps the confident feminist self-image of these upscale
magazines, as distinct from the cautious exploration of women's issues in the
middle-class Redbook, confirms a canard about feminism—that it is the province
of upper-income urban professional women. But Ms. is neither upscale nor
fashionable, and it's much too earnest to be sophisticated. Feminism—or, at
least, support for feminist ideals—is not simply a matter of class, or even
race.

Susan McHenry, a senior editor at Working Woman and the
former executive editor of Emerge, a new magazine for middle-class
African-Americans, senses in African-American women readers "universal
embrace of women's rights and the notion that the women's movement has been
helpful." Embrace of the women's movement, however, is equivocal. "If
you start talking about the women's movement, you hear a lot about what we
believe and what white women believe."

For many black women, devoting time and energy to feminist
causes or feminist groups may simply not be a priority. Black women "feel
both racism and sexism," McHenry believes, but they consider the fight for
racial justice their primary responsibility and assume that white women will
pay primary attention to gender issues. Leslie Adamson, the executive secretary
to the president of Radcliffe College, offers a different explanation. She
doesn't, in fact, "feel" sexism and racism equally: "Sex
discrimination makes me indignant. Racial discrimination makes me
enraged." Adamson is sympathetic to feminism and says that she has always
"had a feminist mind." Still, she does not feel particularly
oppressed as a woman. "I can remember only two instances of sex
discrimination in my life," she says. "Once when I was in the sixth
grade and wanted to take shop and they made me take home economics; once when I
visited my husband's relatives in Trinidad and they wouldn't let me talk about
politics. Racism has always affected me on a regular basis." Cynthia Bell,
the communications director for Greater Southeast Healthcare System, in
Washington, D.C., offers a similar observation: "It wasn't until I
graduated from college that I encountered sexual discrimination. I remember
racial discrimination from the time I remember being myself."

Black women who share feminist ideals but associate
feminism with white women sometimes prefer to talk about "womanism,"
a term endorsed by such diverse characters as Alice Walker (who is credited
with coining it) and William Safire. Susan McHenry prefers to avoid using the
term "women's movement" and talks instead about "women
moving." She identifies with women "who are getting things done,
regardless of what they call themselves." But unease with the term "feminism"
has been a persistent concern in the feminist movement, whether the unease is
attributed to racial divisions or to residual resistance to feminist ideals. It
is, in fact, a complicated historical phenomenon that reflects feminism's
successes as well as its failures.

The Less Tainted Half

That feminism has the power to expand women's aspirations
and improve their lives without enlisting them as card-carrying feminists is a
tribute to its strength as a social movement. Feminism is not dependent on
ideological purity (indeed, it has always been a mixture of conflicting
ideologies) or any formal organizational structure. In the nineteenth century
feminism drew upon countless unaffiliated voluntary associations of women
devoted to social reform or self-improvement. Late-twentieth-century feminism
has similarly drawn upon consciousness-raising groups, professional
associations, community-action groups, and the increased work-force
participation of middle-class women, wrought partly by economic forces and a
revolution in birth control. Throughout its 150-year history feminism has
insinuated itself into the culture as women have sought to improve their status
and increase their participation in the world outside the home. If women are
moving in a generally feminist direction—toward greater rights and a fairer
apportionment of social responsibilities—does it matter what they call
themselves?

In the nineteenth century many, maybe most, women who took
part in the feminist movement saw themselves as paragons of femininity. The
great historic irony of feminism is that the supposed feminine virtues that
justified keeping women at home—sexual purity, compassion, and a talent for
nurturance—eventually justified their release from the home as well. Women
were "the less tainted half of the race," Frances Willard, the
president of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, declared, and
thus were the moral guardians of society.

But in the long run, identifying feminism with femininity
offered women limited liberation. The feminine weaknesses that were presumed to
accompany feminine virtues justified the two-tier labor force that kept women
out of executive positions and political office and out of arduous, high-paying
manual-labor jobs (although women were never considered too weak to scrub
floors). By using femininity as their passport to the public sphere, women came
to be typecast in traditional feminine roles that they are still playing and
arguing about today. Are women naturally better suited to parenting than men?
Are men naturally better suited to waging war? Are women naturally more
cooperative and compassionate, more emotive and less analytic, than men?

A great many American women (and men) still seem to answer
these questions in the affirmative, as evidenced by public resistance to
drafting women and the private reluctance of women to assign, and men to
assume, equal responsibility for child care. Feminism, however, is popularly
deemed to represent an opposing belief that men and women are equally capable
of raising children and equally capable of waging war. Thus feminism
represents, in the popular view, a rejection of femininity.

Feminists have long fought for day-care and family-leave
programs, but they still tend to be blamed for the work-family conundrum.
Thirty-nine percent of women recently surveyed by Redbook said that feminism
had made it "harder" for women to balance work and family life.
Thirty-two percent said that feminism made "no difference" to women's
balancing act. This may reflect a failure of feminists to make child care an
absolutely clear priority. It may also reflect the association of feminism with
upper-income women like Zoe Baird, who can solve their child-care problems with
relative ease. But, as Zoe Baird discovered, Americans are still ambivalent
about women's roles within and outside the home.

Feminism and the careerism it entails are commonly
regarded as a zero-sum game not just for women and men but for women and
children as well, Ellen Levine believes: wage-earning mothers still tend to
feel guilty about not being with their children and to worry that "the
more women get ahead professionally, the more children will fall back."
Their guilt does not seem to be assuaged by any number of studies showing that
the children of wage-earning mothers fare as well as the children of full-time
homemakers, Levine adds. It seems to dissipate only as children grow up and
prosper.

Feminists who dismiss these worries as backlash risk
trivializing the inevitable stresses confronting wage-earning mothers (even
those with decent day care). Feminists who respond to these worries by
suggesting that husbands should be more like wives and mothers are likely to be
considered blind or hostile to presumptively natural sex differences that are
still believed to underlie traditional gender roles.

To the extent that it advocates a revolution in gender
roles, feminism also comes as a reproach to women who lived out the tradition,
especially those who lived it out unhappily. Robin Morgan says, "A woman
who's been unhappily married for forty years and complains constantly to her
friends, saying 'I've got to get out of this,' might stand up on a talk show
and say feminism is destroying the family."

The Wages of Equality

Ambivalence about equality sometimes seems to plague the
feminist movement almost as much today as it did ten years ago, when it
defeated the Equal Rights Amendment. Worth noting is that in the legal arena
feminism has met with less success than the civil-rights movement. The power of
the civil-rights movement in the 1960s was the power to demonstrate the gap
between American ideals of racial equality and the American reality for
African-Americans. We've never had the same professed belief in sexual
equality: federal equal-employment law has always treated racial discrimination
more severely than sex discrimination, and so has the Supreme Court. The Court
has not extended to women the same constitutional protection it has extended to
racial minorities, because a majority of justices have never rejected the
notion that some degree of sex discrimination is only natural.

The widespread belief in equality demonstrated by polls is
a belief in equality up to a point—the point where women are drafted and men
change diapers. After thirty years of the contemporary women's movement,
equal-rights feminism is still considered essentially abnormal. Ellen Levine
notes that middle-class family women sometimes associate feminism with
lesbianism, which has yet to gain middle-class respectability. Homophobia is not
entirely respectable either, however, so it may not be expressed directly in
polls or conversations; but it has always been a subtext of popular resistance
to feminism. Feminists have alternately been accused of hating men and of
wanting to be just like them.

There's some evidence that the fear of feminism as a
threat to female sexuality may be lessening: 77 percent of women recently
surveyed by Redbook answered "yes" to the question "Can a woman
be both feminine and a feminist?" But they were answering a question in
the abstract. When women talk about why they don't identify with feminists,
they often talk about not wanting to lose their femininity. To the extent that
an underlying belief in feminine virtues limits women to feminine roles, as it
did a hundred years ago, this rejection of the feminist label is a rejection of
full equality. In the long run, it matters what women call themselves.

Or does it? Ironically, many self-proclaimed feminists
today express some of the same ambivalence about changing gender roles as the
"I'm not a feminist, but..." women ("...but I believe in equal
opportunity or family leave or reproductive choice"). The popular image of
feminism as a more or less unified quest for androgynous equality, promoted by
the feminists' nemesis Camille Paglia, is at least ten years out of date.

The Comforts of Gilliganism

Central to the dominant strain of feminism today is the
belief, articulated by the psychologist Carol Gilligan, that women share a
different voice and different moral sensibilities. Gilligan's work—notably In
a Different Voice (1982)—has been effectively attacked by other feminist
scholars, but criticisms of it have not been widely disseminated, and it has
passed with ease into the vernacular. In a modern-day version of Victorian True
Womanhood, feminists and also some anti-feminists pay tribute to women's
superior nurturing and relational skills and their general "ethic of
caring." Sometimes feminists add parenthetically that differences between
men and women may well be attributable to culture, not nature. But the
qualification is moot. Believers in gender difference tend not to focus on
changing the cultural environment to free men and women from stereotypes, as
equal-rights feminists did twenty years ago; instead they celebrate the
feminine virtues.

It was probably inevitable that the female solidarity at
the base of the feminist movement would foster female chauvinism. All men are
jerks, I might agree on occasion, over a bottle of wine. But that's an
attitude, not an analysis, and only a small minority of separatist feminists
turn it into an ideology. Gilliganism addresses the anxiety that is provoked by
that attitude—the anxiety about compromising their sexuality which many
feminists share with nonfeminists.

Much as they dislike admitting it, feminists generally
harbor or have harbored categorical anger toward men. Some would say that such
anger is simply an initial stage in the development of a feminist
consciousness, but it is also an organizing tool and a fact of life for many
women who believe they live in a sexist world. And whether or not it is laced
with anger, feminism demands fundamental changes in relations between the sexes
and the willingness of feminists to feel like unnatural women and be treated as
such. For heterosexual women, feminism can come at a cost. Carol Gilligan's
work valorizing women's separate emotional sphere helped make it possible for
feminists to be angry at men and challenge their hegemony without feeling
unwomanly. Nancy Rosenblum, a professor of political science at Brown
University, says that Gilliganism resolved the conflict for women between
feminism and femininity by "de-eroticizing it." Different-voice
ideology locates female sexuality in maternity, as did Victorian visions of the
angel in the house. In its simplest form, the idealization of motherhood
reduces popular feminism to the notion that women are nicer than men.

Women are also widely presumed to be less warlike than
men. "Women bring love; that's our role," one woman explained at a
feminist rally against the Gulf War which I attended; it seemed less like a
rally than a revival meeting. Women shared their need "to connect"
and "do relational work." They recalled Jane Addams, the women's
peace movement between the two world wars, and the Ban the Bomb marches of
thirty years ago. They suggested that pacifism was as natural to women as
child-birth, and were barely disconcerted by the presence of women soldiers in
the Gulf. Military women were likely to be considered self-hating or
male-identified or the hapless victims of a racist, classist economy, not
self-determined women with minds and voices all their own. The war was
generally regarded as an allegory of male supremacy; the patriarch Bush was the
moral equivalent of the patriarch Saddam Hussein. If only men would listen to
women, peace, like a chador, would enfold us.

In part, the trouble with True Womanhood is its tendency
to substitute sentimentality for thought. Constance Buchanan, an associate dean
of the Harvard Divinity School, observes that feminists who believe women will
exercise authority differently often haven't done the hard work of figuring out
how they will exercise authority at all. "Many feminists have an almost
magical vision of institutional change," Buchanan says. "They've
focused on gaining access but haven't considered the scale and complexity of
modern institutions, which will not necessarily change simply by virtue of
their presence."

Feminists who claim that women will "make a
difference" do, in fact, often argue their case simply by pointing to the
occasional female manager who works by consensus, paying little attention to
hierarchy and much attention to her employees' feelings—assuming that such
women more accurately represent their sex than women who favor unilateral
decision-making and tend not to nurture employees. In other words,
different-voice feminists often assume their conclusions: the many women whose
characters and behavior contradict traditional models of gender difference
(Margaret Thatcher is the most frequently cited example) are invariably
dismissed as male-identified.

From Marilyn to Hillary

Confronted with the challenge of rationalizing and
accommodating profound differences among women, in both character and ideology,
feminism has never been a tranquil movement, or a cheerfully anarchic one. It
has always been plagued by bitter civil wars over conflicting ideas about
sexuality and gender which lead to conflicting visions of law and social
policy. If men and women are naturally and consistently different in terms of
character, temperament, and moral sensibility, then the law should treat them
differently, as it has through most of our history, with labor legislation that
protects women, for example, or with laws preferring women in custody disputes:
special protection for women, not equal rights, becomes a feminist goal. (Many
feminists basically agree with Marilyn Quayle's assertion that women don't want
to be liberated from their essential natures.) But if men and women do not conform
to masculine and feminine character models, if sex is not a reliable predictor
of behavior, then justice requires a sex-neutral approach to law which
accommodates different people's different characters and experiences (the
approach championed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg twenty years ago).

In academia this has been dubbed the
"sameness-difference" debate, though no one on either side is
suggesting that men and women are the same. Advocates of laws protecting women
suggest that men and women tend to differ from each other in predictable ways,
in accord with gender stereotypes. Equal-rights advocates suggest that men and
women differ unpredictably and that women differ from one another
unpredictably.

It's fair to say that both sides in this debate are
operating in the absence of conclusive scientific evidence confirming or
denying the existence of biologically based, characterological sex differences.
But this is a debate less about science than about law. Even if we could compromise,
and agree that sex and gender roles reflect a mixture of natural and cultural
programming, we'd still have to figure out not only what is feasible for men
and women but also what is just. If there are natural inequities between the
sexes, it is hardly the business of law to codify them.

In the 1980s this debate about sex and law became a
cottage industry for feminist academics, especially post-modernists who could
take both sides in the debate, in celebration of paradox and multiculturalism.
On one side, essentialism—a belief in natural, immutable sex differences—is
anathema to postmodernists, for whom sexuality itself, along with gender, is a
"social construct." Sensitivity to race-and class-based differences
among women also militates against a belief in a monolithic feminine culture:
from a postmodern perspective, there is no such category as "woman."
Taken to its logical conclusion, this emphasis on the fragmentation of the body
politic makes postmodern feminism an oxymoron: feminism and virtually all our
laws against sex discrimination reflect the presumption that women do in fact
constitute a political category. On the other side, to the extent that
postmodernism includes multiculturalism, it endorses tribalism, or identity
politics, which for some feminists entails a strong belief in "women's
ways." Thus the theoretical rejection of essentialism is matched by an
attitudinal embrace of it.

Outside academia, debates about sex and justice are
sometimes equally confused and confusing, given the political and ideological
challenges of affirmative-action programs and the conflicting demands on women
with both career aspirations and commitments to family life. Feminists often
have to weigh the short-term benefits of protecting wage-earning mothers (by
mommy-tracking, for example) against the long-term costs of a dual labor
market. Sometimes ideological clarity is lost in complicated strategy debates.
Sometimes ideological conflicts are put aside when feminists share a
transcendent social goal, such as suffrage or reproductive choice. And
sometimes one ideological strain of feminism dominates another. In the 1970s
equal-rights feminism was ascendent. The 1980s saw a revival of protectionism.

Equal-rights feminism couldn't last. It was profoundly
disruptive for women as well as men. By questioning long-cherished notions
about sex, it posed unsettling questions about selfhood. It challenged men and
women to shape their own identities without resort to stereotypes. It posed
particular existential challenges to women who were accustomed to knowing
themselves through the web of familial relations. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton
observed more than a hundred years ago, equal-rights feminism challenges women
to acknowledge that they are isolated individuals as well. Stressing that like
"every human soul" women "must make the voyage of life
alone," Stanton, the mother of seven and a political organizer who spent
most of her life in crowds, exhorted women to recognize the "solitude of
self."

This emphasis on individual autonomy didn't just scare
many women; it struck them as selfish—as it might be if it were unaccompanied
by an ongoing commitment to family and community. Twenty years ago feminists
made the mistake of denigrating homemaking and volunteer work. It's hard to
imagine how else they might have made their case. Still, the feminist attack on
volunteering was simplistic and ill-informed. Feminists might have paid
attention to the historical experiences of middle-class African-American women
combining paid work, volunteering, and family life. They might have paid
attention to the critical role played by the volunteer tradition in the
nineteenth-century feminist movement. Women's sense of their maternal
responsibilities at home and in the wider world was at the core of their shared
social conscience, which feminists ignored at their peril. Feminism will not
succeed with American women, as Constance Buchanan notes, until it offers them
a vision that reconciles the assertion of equal rights with the assumption of
social responsibilities.

That's the vision Hillary Clinton is striving to embody,
as a family woman and a feminist, an advocate of civil rights and a preacher of
a caring and sharing politics of meaning. I wish her luck: the difficulty she
encountered during the campaign persuading people that she has a maternal side
reflects the strong popular presumption that a commitment to equality is
incompatible with a willingness to nurture.

We should know better. In fact millions of American women
working outside the home are exercising rights and assuming
responsibilities—for better or worse, that's one of the legacies of feminism.
Women who sought equal rights in the 1970s have not abandoned their families,
like Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer as anti-feminists predicted they would.
Instead they have overworked themselves, acting as breadwinners and primary
caretakers, too. Given the absence of social and institutional support—family
leave and day care—it's not surprising that women would turn for sustenance to
traditional notions of sex difference. The belief that they were naturally
better suited to child care than men would relieve them of considerable anger
toward their husbands. As Victorian women invoked maternal virtue to justify
their participation in the public sphere, so contemporary American women have
used it to console themselves for the undue burdens they continue to bear in
the private one.

Notions of immutable sex differences explained a range of
social inequities—the plight of displaced homemakers, the persistence of
sexual violence, the problems of women working double shifts within and outside
the home. The general failure of hard-won legal rights to ensure social justice
(which plagued civil-rights activists as well as feminists) might have been
considered a failure of government—to enforce civil-rights laws and make them
matter or to provide social services. It might have been considered a failure
of community—our collective failure to care for one another. Instead it was
roundly condemned as a failure of feminism, because it provided convenient
proof of what many men and women have always believed—that biology is destiny
after all. Equal-rights feminism fell out of favor, even among feminists,
because it made people terribly uncomfortable and because legal rights were not
accompanied by a fair division of familial and communal responsibilities.

Feminism Succumbs to Femininity

The feminist drive for equal rights was supposed to have
been revitalized last year, and it's true that women were politically activated
and made significant political gains. It's clear that women are moving, but in
what direction? What is the women's movement all about?

Vying for power today are poststructural feminists
(dominant in academia in recent years), political feminists (office-holders and
lobbyists), different-voice feminists, separatist feminists (a small minority),
pacifist feminists, lesbian feminists, careerist feminists, liberal feminists
(who tend also to be political feminists), anti-porn feminists, eco-feminists,
and womanists. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive categories, and
this is hardly an exhaustive list. New Age feminists and goddess worshippers
widen the array of alternative truths. And the newest category of feminism,
personal-development feminism, led nominally by Gloria Steinem, puts a popular
feminist spin on deadeningly familiar messages about recovering from addiction
and abuse, liberating one's inner child, and restoring one's self-esteem.

The marriage of feminism and the phenomenally popular
recovery movement is arguably the most disturbing (and potentially influential)
development in the feminist movement today. It's based partly on a shared
concern about child abuse, nominally a left-wing analogue to right-wing anxiety
about the family. There's an emerging alliance of anti-pornography and
anti-violence feminists with therapists who diagnose and treat child abuse,
including "ritual abuse" and "Satanism" (often said to be
linked to pornography). Feminism is at risk of being implicated in the unsavory
business of hypnotizing suspected victims of abuse to help them
"retrieve" their buried childhood memories. Gloria Steinem has
blithely praised the important work of therapists in this field without even a
nod to the potential for, well, abuse when unhappy, suggestible people who are
angry at their parents are exposed to suggestive hypnotic techniques designed
to uncover their histories of victimization.

But the involvement of some feminists in the
memory-retrieval industry is only one manifestation of a broader ideological
threat posed to feminism by the recovery movement. Recovery, with its absurdly
broad definitions of addiction and abuse encourages people to feel fragile and
helpless. Parental insensitivity is classed as child abuse, along with parental
violence, because all suffering is said to be equal (meaning entirely
subjective); but that's appropriate only if all people are so terribly weak
that a cross word inevitably has the destructive force of a blow. Put very
simply, women need a feminist movement that makes them feel strong.

Enlisting people in a struggle for liberation without
exaggerating the ways in which they're oppressed is a challenge for any
civil-rights movement. It's a particularly daunting one for feminists, who are
still arguing among themselves about whether women are oppressed more by nature
or by culture. For some feminists, strengthening women is a matter of alerting
them to their natural vulnerabilities.

There has always been a strain of feminism that presents
women as frail and naturally victimized. As it was a hundred years ago,
feminist victimism is today most clearly expressed in sexuality debates—about
pornography, prostitution, rape, and sexual harassment. Today sexual violence
is a unifying focal point for women who do and women who do not call themselves
feminists: 84 percent of women surveyed by Redbook considered "fighting
violence against women" to be "very important." (Eighty-two
percent rated workplace equality and 54 percent rated abortion rights as very
important.) Given this pervasive, overriding concern about violence and our
persistent failure to address it effectively, victimism is likely to become an
important organizing tool for feminism in the 1990s.

Feminist discussions of sexual offenses often share with
the recovery movement the notion that, again, there are no objective measures
of suffering: all suffering is said to be equal, in the apparent belief that
all women are weak. Wage-earning women testify to being "disabled" by
sexist remarks in the workplace. College women testify to the trauma of being
fondled by their dates. The term "date rape," like the term
"addiction," no longer has much literal, objective meaning. It tends
to be used figuratively, as a metaphor signifying that all heterosexual
encounters are inherently abusive of women. The belief that in a male-dominated
culture that has "normalized" rape, "yes" can never really
mean "yes" has been popularized by the anti-pornography feminists
Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. (Dworkin devoted an entire book to the
contention that intercourse is essentially a euphemism for rape.) But only five
years ago Dworkin and MacKinnon were leaders of a feminist fringe. Today, owing
partly to the excesses of multiculturalism and the exaltation of victimization,
they're leaders in the feminist mainstream.

Why is feminism helping to make women feel so vulnerable!
Why do some young women on Ivy League campuses, among the most privileged
people on the globe, feel oppressed? Why does feminist victimology seem so much
more pervasive among middle-and upper-class whites than among lower-income
women, and girls, of color? Questions like these need to be aired by feminists.
But in some feminist circles it is heresy to suggest that there are degrees of
suffering and oppression, which need to be kept in perspective. It is heresy to
suggest that being raped by your date may not be as traumatic or terrifying as
being raped by a stranger who breaks into your bedroom in the middle of the
night. It is heresy to suggest that a woman who has to listen to her colleagues
tell stupid sexist jokes has a lesser grievance than a woman who is physically
accosted by her supervisor. It is heresy, in general, to question the testimony
of self-proclaimed victims of date rape or harassment, as it is heresy in a
twelve-step group to question claims of abuse. All claims of suffering are
sacred and presumed to be absolutely true. It is a primary article of faith
among many feminists that women don't lie about rape, ever; they lack the
dishonesty gene. Some may call this feminism, but it looks more like femininity
to me.

Blind faith in women's pervasive victimization also looks
a little like religion. "Contemporary feminism is a new kind of religion,"
Camille Paglia complains, overstating her case with panache. But if her
metaphor begs to be qualified, it offers a nugget of truth. Feminists choose
among competing denominations with varying degrees of passion, and belief; what
is gospel to one feminist is a working hypothesis to another. Still, like every
other ideology and "ism"—from feudalism to capitalism to communism
to Freudianism—feminism is for some a revelation. Insights into the dynamics
of sexual violence are turned into a metaphysic. Like people in recovery who
see addiction lurking in all our desires, innumerable feminists see men's
oppression of women in all our personal and social relations. Sometimes the
pristine earnestness of this theology is unrelenting. Feminism lacks a sense of
black humor.

Of course, the emerging orthodoxy about victimization does
not infect all or even most feminist sexuality debates. Of course, many
feminists harbor heretical thoughts about lesser forms of sexual misconduct.
But few want to be vilified for trivializing sexual violence and collaborating
in the abuse of women.

The Enemy Within

The example of Camille Paglia is instructive. She is
generally considered by feminists to be practically pro-rape, because she has
offered this advice to young women: don't get drunk at fraternity parties,
don't accompany boys to their rooms, realize that sexual freedom entails sexual
risks, and take some responsibility for your behavior. As Paglia says, this
might once have been called common sense (it's what some of our mothers told
us); today it's called blaming the victim.

Paglia is right: it ought to be possible to condemn date
rape without glorifying the notion that women are helpless to avoid it. But not
everyone can risk dissent. A prominent feminist journalist who expressed
misgivings to me about the iconization of Anita Hill chooses not to be
identified. Yet Anita Hill is a questionable candidate for feminist sainthood,
because she was, after all, working for Clarence Thomas voluntarily, apparently
assisting him in what feminists and other civil-rights activists have condemned
as the deliberate nonenforcement of federal equal-employment laws. Was she too
hapless to know better? Feminists are not supposed to ask.

It is, however, not simply undue caution or peer pressure
that squelches dissent among feminists. Many are genuinely ambivalent about
choosing sides in sexuality debates. It is facile, in the context of the AIDS
epidemic, to dismiss concern about date rape as "hysteria." And it
takes hubris (not an unmitigated fault) to suggest that some claims of
victimization are exaggerated, when many are true. The victimization of women
as a class by discriminatory laws and customs, and a collective failure to take
sexual violence seriously, are historical reality. Even today women are being
assaulted and killed by their husbands and boyfriends with terrifying
regularity. When some feminists overdramatize minor acts of sexual misconduct
or dogmatically insist that we must always believe the woman, it is sometimes hard
to blame them, given the historical presumption that women lie about rape
routinely, that wife abuse is a marital squabble, that date rape and marital
rape are not real rape, and that sexual harassment is cute.

Feminists need critics like Paglia who are not afraid to
be injudicious. Paglia's critiques of feminism are, however, flawed by her
limited knowledge of feminist theory. She doesn't even realize what she has in
common with feminists she disdains—notably Carol Gilligan and the attorney and
anti-pornography activist Catharine MacKinnon. Both Paglia and MacKinnon
suggest that sexual relations are inextricably bound up with power relations;
both promote a vision of male sexuality as naturally violent and cruel. But
while Paglia celebrates sexual danger, MacKinnon wants to legislate even the
thought of it away. Both Paglia and Gilligan offer idealized notions of
femininity. But Gilligan celebrates gender stereotypes while Paglia celebrates
sex archetypes. Paglia also offers a refreshingly tough, erotic vision of
female sexuality to counteract the pious maternalism of In a Different Voice.

To the extent that there's a debate between Paglia and the
feminist movement, it's not a particularly thoughtful one, partly because it's
occurring at second hand, in the media. There are thoughtful feminist debates
being conducted in academia, but they're not widely heard. Paglia is highly
critical of feminist academics who don't publish in the mainstream; but people
have a right to choose their venues, and besides, access to the mainstream
press is not easily won. Still, their relative isolation is a problem for
feminist scholars who want to influence public policy. To reach a general
audience they have to depend on journalists to draw upon and sometimes
appropriate their work.

In the end feminism, like other social movements, is
dependent on the vagaries of the marketplace. It's not that women perceive
feminism just the way Time and Newsweek present it to them. They have direct
access only to the kind and quantity of feminist speech deemed marketable.
Today the concept of a feminist movement is considered to have commercial
viability once again. The challenge now is to make public debates about
feminist issues as informed as they are intense.

It's not surprising that we haven't achieved equality; we
haven't even defined it. Nearly thirty years after the onset of the modern
feminist movement, we still have no consensus on what nature dictates to men
and women and demands of law. Does equality mean extending special employment
rights to pregnant women, or limiting the Sixth Amendment rights of men
standing trial for rape, or suspending the First Amendment rights of men who
read pornography? Nearly thirty years after the passage of landmark federal
civil-rights laws, we still have no consensus on the relationship of individual
rights to social justice. But, feminists might wonder, why did rights fall out
of favor with progressives just as women were in danger of acquiring them?

The most
effective backlash against feminism almost always comes from within, as women
either despair of achieving equality or retreat from its demands. The confident
political resurgence of women today will have to withstand a resurgent belief
in women's vulnerabilities. Listening to the sexuality debates, I worry that
women feel so wounded. Looking at feminism, I wonder at the public face of
femininity.

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During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

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The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

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In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

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“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

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A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

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President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

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A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

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